Comment by lynndotpy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lynndotpy | Hacker News Reader

Yesterday, I tried to fill out a PDF on a MacOS laptop. It was very rough.

I've been a longtime Linux user, but one of the nice things about MacOS is that it comes out of the box with software for common file formats. I remember being a bit happy to skip the step where I search "best pdf editor linux".

This was true in 2022, when I started using MacOS. Around that time, people were complaining about a battery icon that was too skeumorphic or something, which is so trite in comparison to the avalanche of problems today.

But, geeze, it's rough to edit a PDF on MacOS today. The built-in PDF editor has a weird flow to add text (rather than clicking where you want to place the text, you click a button which summons a box with the text "Text" in an arbitrary position on your PDF). You have to click and drag the Text textbox to the position you want it to be in.

Every part of the UI is broken, though. You have to discover this by clicking (all icons, no text), you have to move the textbox by finding the 1px wide click-and-drag target (on a high-DPI display!), and sometimes, the text simply disappears and deletes itself, in a way no amount of cmd+Z (undo) can fix.

It's very frustrating and crazy-making, but the amount of time it took to fill out one page of a PDF precludes me from wanting to take the effort to document it in this way.

So, I very very much appreciate this author for sharing a few of the million papercuts of MacOS. It is really hard to imagine someone being proud of putting this product out.

Was it a poorly-authored PDF without fields? You’d be SOL entirely on Windows in that situation. I find Preview’s PDF editing pretty intuitive generally.

I also like that Preview gets page numbers right in complex documents like textbooks. If a problem set is on page 89 (which might be the 115th actual page), I can just go to it. I’ve yet to see any other free or built in PDF reader do that.

Okular (KDE) and Evince (GNOME) both do.

If the PDF doesn't contain form completion elements you have to use the "painting / diagramming mode" to add annotations. However, I often find the "form enabled" PDFs to have horribly mis-aligned boxes with odd choices for fonts and inconsistent behavior (check marks or choices for example).

I do agree that the annotation feature isn't like Omnigraffle or draw.io diagramming apps that are based around a mouse; the interface does seem more suitable for a touch (pad, screen). You choose an object to add, then get to move it into place rather than selecting an object to add and then use the mouse to place and size it. The annotation feature also works in a very similar way on an iPad / iPhone.

If you tap (click) and /hold/ anywhere in the hit zone of an object the cursor will move to a hand and you can move it anywhere. For a text box, the hit zone it is almost anywhere on the text - yup, it is more awkward if you delete all the text! The resize / reshape hit zones for objects are centered around the "dots" when the object is active. A single tap (click) will edit text.

I am not sure what is happening when things disappear and cmd-Z doesn't undo, I've not experienced that.

This markup feature is also available when annotating image attachments in email.

It would be nice to be able to group more than a single set of objects and keep them grouped.

I've used the annotation feature quite a lot to highlight errors in web pages and give sequence instructions on how to do something on a poorly designed site.

You should try to add comments with that built-in editor. You can spend hours of writing the comments, and then suddenly, some comment gets corrupted and it removes all existing comments. All work gone. You can't trust that tool.

PDF editing hasn't changed, it's just that some PDFs have text fields while others don't. It's also possible that Preview isn't compatible with all PDFs' text fields, idk. That "text" button was always there as a fallback.

I am describing only the behavior of the "text" button and not of text fields, yes.

Oh ok. I'm not sure about the undo thing, but the behavior of a placeholder "text" box appearing in a random spot has always annoyed me, and it's felt hard to resize. That's not new.

Semi new thing is the removal of proper "save as" in Preview and other 1P apps starting in Lion. Still sucks and still hasn't caught on in 3P apps.

Papercuts, that's a neat way of describing them. Thanks for that!

Honestly I think you're just doing it wrong. Messing with PDF's is probably one of the coolest built in features I know of, and with Markup etc in Preview it's super easy.

Be careful of PDF's with built in broken fields though, in which case I just add a text field on top if it's easier.

You see this pattern a lot around Apple users where they insist there simply can't be bugs in Apple software. It's really counterproductive and it's part of the "crazymaking" element of interacting with Apple software and Apple's fanbase.

There should be nothing "wrong" I can do which makes text disappear which can't be undone, or where the click-and-drag targets are as tiny as can be.

The program is buggy. Apple releases bad software sometimes. That is simply all there is to it.

Okay, I'll bite. Also see my other comment.

You said "mouse", is it a gaming mouse? Is it configured to issue a bazillion clicks if you press and hold "left" button - for a stupidly small number of ms, taking no consideration of you if you are playing a game? Does it also send "wiggler" (WASD) keyboard presses at the same time? Either of these will ruin any chance of you doing "undo", unless you also "undo" a bazillion times. This behavior will likely make a lot of other things behave in quite weird ways and be "slow" to respond. If you've got a gaming mouse doing auto-clicks, auto-kbd strokes for non-game apps, then the UI designed for humans is going to behave weirdly.

FWIW, the placeholder text can never really disappear, if you remove it all, you get the placeholder "Text" back again. You can replace it with a single space, but that also has a hit zone of more than 1px both H & V. Maybe you have found a bug. I do think there are issues with font background / foreground colour selection that might make it "invisible", but the hit zone will still be there.

I use an ancient mouse, "Microsoft Comfort Optical Mouse 1000" and an Apple Trackpad. I cannot reproduce what you describe.

What mouse are you using? What additional HID (Mouse, KBD) extensions do you have installed?

It's pretty unusual for even gaming mice to do this, but it's possible

I did not say "mouse" anywhere, I think you might be mistaking your own comments as my own.

And, no. This is 100% Apple hardware and software. I am using Apple's trackpad, built into one of the most recent Apple laptops, using the latest Apple desktop OS.

Are you able to share the PDF in question, or a screenshot for example?

> Every part of the UI is broken, though. You have to discover this by clicking (all icons, no text)

And no tooltips either. Even by clicking I couldn't figure out what most of the buttons even do. A lot of them seem to do absolutely nothing. The only thing I've learned is to summon a randomly sized box on a random position and then struggle to resize and reposition it.

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